Joshua Cohen - Book of Numbers

He turned, I sat, as the waitstaff bared the table and plied its cloth.

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As I slung my tote through the lobby and out, litzened doormen doffed their laureled caps.

Danke, guten tag.

It was a dank gutted tag, no sun toward noon. I wended around polygonous planters, barrier hollies unberried. Men adjusted wool blends, their tieknots the size of the Kaiser’s scrotum. Women long and thin lightered long thin flavored cigs and exhaled into their phonecalls. Deathmasked Hungarians. Serbs or Croats, unplaceables or just Danes. Their scents were cloved smoke, buffet borborygmi, and olent Hofbrand unguents, and the languages they conferred in were all, or none — Euroenglish, Euronglish spraying like water not from the fountain, drained beyond the colonnade. And I was the only American among them — the only American to still be dawdling the day away with a fair on.

I followed the delegates from the smaller lesser nations of smaller lesser languages through the Platz der Republik, a dull hub of officespace like deserted barracks, bunkers exhumed. Every Mercedes M-Class 4×4 ever made rolled by, windows up. The access to the Messe was meshfenced and coned between signs indicating the airport, Lufthansa billboards vandalizing the orisont tethering inflatable jets. The forecast called for a 100 % chance of flurried schedule sheets and complimentary bookmarks.

The newest structures formed a quad, or tetrad — four halls numbered consecutively, 1 and 2 projecting from a concession terminant in screeningroom, a massive A/V ark whose presence and purpose demonstrated the lack of confidence bookpeople have in their product — why read? why not just grab a seat in the theater and conk out?

Halls 3 and 4 were of architectural interest, roofed in gently sloping metal dunes. Impressions: each mirroring metal wave resembled an abdominal segment of a robotic roach, a cuttlefish’s iridescent cuttlebone, or a toucan’s beak cast in dental amalgam, an armoring scute of an armadillo, while the total effect was that of a multizeppelin crash, or a mashup of the Decepticon mothership Nemesis and the Autobot derelict planet Cybertron, from the animated TV series and liveaction movies, respectively, of Transformers .

Not just four halls — on the back of the backpage of the schedule was a map — everything was a mirroring. My fellow Americans were all in Hall 8, apparently.

Halls 5 through 8 inclusive reminded me of malls, best measured not in square meters but in parsecs. I walked through them and sidestepped their conveyors. I walked between them, and there was Frankfurt’s skyline, like apocalypse does Dallas. Your friendly neighborhood global banking headquarters — Deutsche Bank’s logo of a blue square slit diagonally has always read to me like the desolate vagina of a war widow.

She was being positioned, canted, bolted, this survivor of the gender wars, arm up, arm down, legs spread wide as if to imply a corresponding wideness of taste — a mannequin of Charlotte, whether her first name or last they’d only posted that, the first female printer in history. Paris, reign of Francis I. Alongside her pose was pasteboarded a polyglot factsheet about homosexuality and publishing. Friedrich Koenig, no umlaut for him, invented the first nonmanpowered, but steampowered, press, an unwieldy replica of which anchored the display. The Asians, despite all their advances, their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe, were underrepresented, inevitably. Theirs was just another but scanty polyglot boardtext noting all their innovation of paper and ink and styli before Europe. Clay and wood and bronze. Lead and tin and antimony. Samples. Gutenberg and his moneylenders were dummied prominently, don’t doubt.

The translation’s typography was blackletter Textura, Fraktur, the spelling unstable, incunabular: “Johanes.” Mainz was referred to as “the once rival of Frankfurt.” Once upon a time. Snobs. The installation featured animatronics, rather inside the cases were Poles and the murmurs reverberant from behind the plastic sheeting were in Polish responding to yelled German. They were running late. They were running with screwdrivers to tighten the screw on a press. It was the same as the oil principle, the crushing of seed, nut, olive. Smithing. Gemcutting. Platen. Windlass. Gutenberg’s father, Friele Gensfleisch zur Laden, was employed by the ecclesiastical mint. My speculation, exactly. Chirography, typography, money mania. A coin is minted by mold, the metals are poured into it, and an image is stamped on the surface. Given that a nickel now is just a quarter nickel, it’s strictly the image that coins the worth, glyphs of tetrarchs and portraits of feudal royalty, with time becoming kitschy graphics of livestock and wheat. Given that paper’s still paper it’s the scripting that authenticates the bill, the signatures of presidents or primeministers, treasurers, reserve chiefs. Pecuniary inscription being a residuum of the regent’s seal or signet ring, the guarantor of authorship and so, of authority. Sphragides, sigilia, specie and fiat currencies, movable type, all systems of writing to date, in each instance an arbitrary materiality is forcibly impressed with transitory value. Proof of identity. Colophons of self. I told the registration guards my name was Aaron Szlay, and though I’d left my pass back in the room I could show them my swipecard in its sleeve with that name on it. They consulted their list, credentialed me, couldn’t have been nicer.

I entered under scaffolding. Let history record that in my lifetime most major public spaces were being renovated and not many ever utilized their main entrances.

Stamping through literatures familiar and not. Books everyone in America who reads has already read, now finally new again in translation. Books that nanocosm of literate America will pretend to be familiar with, if given the opportunity. The same book in multiple editions, the memoirs of a writer, his wife, her lover, of some kidnapped juvenile who grew up to become the first democratically elected female CEO of Muslim Africa, each language’s copy cut into the shape, the mapshape, of the land in which that language obtained, the books arranged to puzzle Europe. They were cutting the final books, the jigs and jags of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, with saws. Still on the schedule was when they’d gather the 10 thickest volumes published since last fair and toss knives at them or shoot them. As if to determine the densest. A banner tugged taut, into an expressionless mouth: this year, the fair’s theme was either the Future of Books, or the Books of the Future — sometimes with German all I get are the nouns.

America, at last.

Stomping past my publisher, expecting Finn, his bosses. Other publishers had pavilions, mine had a breakaway republic. Hostile sovereign Midtown territory. I wouldn’t have been surprised by a functional military. An intense assisterhood whose mufti concealed all variety of weaponry. The jaded. The coy. The derisive. I kept my head down to flatter myself. The intern of my enemy is not my friend, the extern of my enemy is, forget it.

Finn must’ve been elsewhere.

The agencies all had the same style of booth crowded clustered at center hall, foldingchairs but upholstered in oxblood, foldingtables but teak. Placards bearing agency name and Messe directory number propped atop. To be a truly venerable publisher you have to be European or owned by Europeans with a vast backcatalog of pogrom tracts or Nazi agitprop to rely on. To be a decent agent all you have to be is American and social. Convince, be competent. Smile.

“Seth,” which wasn’t my memory but his lanyarded tag, was skinnysuited with a skinny tie, a quiff. Hipbony, hipstery, novelty Masonic tieclip and links.